Ecohorror Special Cluster: “Living in Fear, Living in Dread, Pretty Soon We'll All Be Dead”

Abstract

Horror is a powerful word. It evokes feelings of loathing, repugnance, aversion, dread, and outright terror. Horrific events take place in our world every day, so it is only natural that these events find their way into our collective imagination through literature, cinema, and other forms of art and popular discourse. These days, phrases like global climate change, the sixth extinction, and environmental injustice alert us to the horrific events poised to alter life as we know it on this planet. As literary and film scholars, we find that as we read texts, our sense of horror is amplified by considering the relationship between textual terrors and those in the material world. When one considers the terrors that humanity hath wrought upon the planet, particularly over the past two centuries, it is easy to be scared. As a literary and cinematic form, ecohorror has thus far been narrowly defined in popular discourse as those instances in texts when nature strikes back against humans as punishment for environmental disruption. Scholarship to this point has demonstrated that ecohorror motifs are most often found in “revenge of nature” narratives like Steven Spielberg's iconic film Jaws (1975) but may also occur in less overtly ecocritical works. A more expansive definition of ecohorror, which we would like to elucidate via this special cluster of essays, includes analyses of texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world, or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/non-human distinctions more broadly. Ecohorror, which assumes that environmental disruption is haunting humanity's relationship to the non-human world, is present in a broad set of texts grappling with ecocritical matters, and therefore this concentrated study is necessary to sketch out the boundaries of this important new area of ecocritical study. Ecohorror reaches across media (literature, film, etc.) and works with concepts (Gothic, ecophobia, agency, etc.) that many ecocritics are currently thinking about. The term ecohorror has been in use since at least the mid-1990s to describe works of literature and film in which human characters are attacked by natural forces—typically animals and plants—that have been altered or angered by humans in some way (Chizmar, Gambin). In popular media, the term has seen increased use over the past six years to describe a cycle of mainstream ecohorror films produced in the wake of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), including The Last Winter (2006), The Happening (2008), and Take Shelter (2011) (Ulaby, Whitty). In academic discourse, the film scholar John Kenneth Muir makes one mention of the term in his 2002 book Horror Films of the 1970s and Catherine Simpson develops the concept further in her 2010 article “Australian Eco-Horror and Gaia's Revenge: Animals” for Studies in Australian Cinema. To date, Bernice M. Murphy's 2013 book, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness, presents the most thorough treatment of ecohorror in film and literature and its resonance with cultural fears of environmental apocalypse. As Murphy argues, by confronting readers and viewers with the realization that “absolutely catastrophic ecological disaster looms not in the distant future, but is in fact already unfolding” perceptions of ecohorror have been “assimilated into popular culture” (179). Murphy's book and Simpson's article establish ecohorror as a vital area of inquiry within literary and cinematic studies. This cluster takes the discussion further by considering ecohorror from a wider range of historical contexts and media. In the cluster's first essay, Sara Crosby argues that early American literary ecophilia (love of nature) can be seen as a violent projection of the ego into and over the natural world, a compensatory response to ecophobia that gives rise to iconic figures such as the great white wilderness hero and Transcendentalist nature philosopher. For Crosby, Edgar Allan Poe's ecological detective, who respects nature as an opaque “other” and confines himself to a distant “ratiocinative” relationship to the natural world that insists upon a nonviolent reading of surfaces and that is restricted to parsing the human traces on the landscape, attempts to reconfigure the American ecohorror tradition through his critique of the ecophilia/ecophobia binary. Also critical of human responses to the non-human environment are two influential horror films, The Birds (1963) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), analyzed by Carter Soles as marking a progression of public perception about the anthropogenic causes of environmental apocalypse in the post-Silent Spring 1960s. As Soles argues, while The Birds only indirectly addresses issues of human-caused environmental disaster, leaving the reasons for the birds′ attacks opaque, Night of the Living Dead tackles human culpability for such disasters head-on, offering an even more nihilistic and ambivalent view of human motivations, chances for survival, and counter-cultural response to ecological crisis than its big-budget predecessor. Tightening the focus to consider ecohorror in narratives about individual bodies, Christy Tidwell's essay deploys new materialist and post-humanist theories to argue that Mira Grant's novel Parasite (2013) enacts a productive and potentially dangerous shift from seeing nature as external to seeing it as something that incorporates the human body and consciousness. In Parasite, human control over nature is belied when a genetically modified tapeworm takes over the protagonist's body and mind. According to Tidwell, Parasite asks readers to consider what happens when human/non-human relations come at the cost of human individuality. Further exploring human bodies via material ecocriticism, Stephen Rust's “Comfortably Numb” argues that postmodern horror films of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s deepen viewers’ perceptions of ways that Western culture has figured non-human nature as abject. Rust shows that, through a combination of horror film esthetics and Pink Floyd's music and lyrics, The Wall (1982) unveils the processes by which we distance ourselves psychologically and discursively from the material consequences of capitalist consumerism, a retreat which is also an estrangement from our place in the natural world. Kom Kunyosying's metonymic analysis of Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole (collected in 2005) reveals the comics format's ability to uniquely portray the ecological without reducing it into anthropocentric metaphors. Similar to the function of metonymy in environmental literature, but perhaps more endemic to the comics form, the uncanny, abject, and unquantifiable qualities of Black Hole's metonymic juxtapositions serve to resist the one-way street of metaphor in which nature is reduced to symbols, thereby promoting environmental consciousness by rejecting artificial hierarchies that consider the human as clean and exclusive from the ecological and animal. The cluster concludes with Andy Hageman's ideological critique of the machine–ecology nexus, which analyzes the figure “wheels within wheels” across multiple media and millennia, from the biblical Book of Ezekiel to Shelley's Romantic poetry to contemporary science fiction/horror films such as the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). Hageman argues that the long, diverse history of the “wheels within wheels” figure complicates conventional environmental mechanophobia and points to ways in which ecocritics can recognize the catastrophic environmental conditions we have helped to forge by analyzing the ideologies encrypted within such figures by our culture's ecological unconscious. Thanks to Bernice Murphy for her generosity and feedback.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.